Over time, this increase in purchasing power can be enormous.

The increase in purchasing power should result in lower costs for both companies, it said.

If the central bank simply printed the money, it would have to cope with the resulting increase in purchasing power.

And the statistics surely understate the true increase in purchasing power.

During the last few years, wage increases have generally outpaced the rise in consumer prices, providing Americans with a net increase in purchasing power.

She claims that the implementation of the Euro entailed a rise in prices and its abandonment would lead to an increase in purchasing power.

Increased worker productivity, the greater participation of women in the work force and increased levels of education were cited as factors for the increase in purchasing power.

That is, it must redistribute purchasing power, maintain the industrial base, but reinflate prices and wages to force as much of the inflationary increase in purchasing power into consumer spending.

The problem, said Lawrence Chimerine, chairman of Chase Econometrics, an economic forecasting service, is that productivity gains - the critical ingredient to sustained increases in purchasing power -have been meager, averaging around 1 percent.

"The rise in stock prices, as well as in the capital gains on homes, has created a marked increase in purchasing power without providing an equivalent and immediate expansion in the supply of goods and services," he said.

But under indexing, if the rate of inflation over the five-year period was 25 percent, they would pay tax on only $3,000, the 75 percent of their profit that represents a real increase in purchasing power and is not due just to inflation.

We must remain vigilant and ensure that these wage agreements fit the context of what the rapporteur calls a reasonable increase in purchasing power, that is, a context which also takes account of productivity by sector and region and which therefore does not penalise employment in the long term.

It is a method of fulfilling a deep desire of the public to be deceived by the politician into thinking that public expenditure can be increased faster than the national income is increased without their noticing any diminution of their own rate of increase in purchasing power and standard of living.